INTERLUDE

FACE THE MUSIC

This will never end ‘cause I want more…
More, give me more, give me more…
— Fever Ray, If I Had a Heart

HOW DID I GET HERE, I’M asking myself when I wake up at a bar in a garish nightclub with arched ceilings and chevron carpet. Even stranger is the white I’m wearing, with a black bowtie and a red boutonnière on my lapel.

There’s a slight buzzing ache in my skull as my eyes wander around the smokey room to survey the sea of tables with patrons engaged in drinking and conversation. They’re all women, though some are dressed in boyish suits while others in flapper dresses and knit caps like it’s the Roaring 20’s.

Other than their fashion, the customers and the wait staff delivering their drinks all share the same familiar face, with fair skin and blonde hair like me, and very Gorgo-like smiles split open across their mouths. Curiously, although I can hear them talking all around me, every single one is a motionless model, like a living mannequin on display.

Their mouths aren’t moving. Their bodies are awkwardly posed in mid-motion, like a paused movie, but the clutter of their combined voices are still echoing around the room.

Likewise, the big jazz band at the far end of the room is paused in mid-motion, with instruments held high, the drummer stuck between crash symbols, and a singer with her wide mouth in front of a condenser microphone, but I can still hear her belting out It Had to Be You over a swanky jazz jingle.

“I’ll be with you in a moment, miss,” a deep voice says to me.

My head turns forward to see a bartender cleaning the counter with a rag. It’s a man, the only one in the joint, but most of him is masked in blocks of shadow, with only his arms freely moving in and out of the pitch black. I can see his eyes though, or more to the point, the whites of his eyes, which are islands in a silhouette, with large empty discs in the center.

I fold my arms over the counter and wait. Next to me is a bowl of peanuts. I take a handful and pop them into my mouth a few at a time. A moment later the bartender’s pale hand extends out of the adumbration to place an empty old fashioned glass in front of his new customer.

“What’ll it be,” he asks, looking down with black dots surrounded by white, his face still obscured. His voice reminds me of someone I can’t quite place.

I chomp on the last couple peanuts. “Well,” I start to say with a few bits still in my mouth, “here’s the rub. I don’t know where I am or how I got here. Can you fill me in?”

The bartender thinks for a moment then says, “You need medicine.”

I slap my hand on the bar and point. “You have me confused with my brother. I don’t take pills because I’m not crazy.” I grab another handful of peanuts.

“But you’re mistaken, if you don’t mind me saying.”

I stop mid-chew. There’s something different about this one. Something tugging at a memory I can’t recall. I say with a sarcastic whip, “And why’s that?”

The bartender says, “You are crazy.” A bottle appears in his hand. He pours two fingers of caramel-colored liquor into the glass then sets the bottle aside. “Just like your father.”

My throat feels drier than the Sahara after watching the liquid spread across the bottom of the glass and rise up the sides. I pick it up.

“That’s a funny thing to say,” I offer before downing the drink. It tastes like gasoline and makes my stomach wretch. I put the glass down while coughing up fumes. “Fuck me,” I say hoarsely. “What is that?”

“A house blend,” the bartender answers as he pours another. “Prohibition has required some sacrifices in quality, I’m sad to admit.”

I shake my head no. “I’m done with that shit.”

“As you wish,” the bartender says.

“Why did you say that?”

“What, miss?”

I look at him sideways. “You said ‘just like your father.’ What did you mean by that?”

The bartender takes the glass and knocks it back—smooth. “Your father was certifiably insane. Non compos mentis. That’s why they put him in the looney bin.”

“How do you know that,” I say suspiciously. “Did you know my father?”

“In a way,” he says with his teeth gleaming through the darkness while pouring another mouthful. “I’m your father—or rather, your memory of him, and I’m here because you have been such a disappointment.”

A creeping dread festers in the dark hollow of my mind like a necrosis slowly devouring not flesh, but thought. Hysteria makes my chest tighten and my heart race. Sweat gathers on my skin. Without thinking my unsteady hand picks up the glass. Liquid courage. I dispatched the burning alcohol straight to my gut.

I breathed fire after putting the glass down. “I’ve done nothing to disappoint you. I’m almost halfway through the list. I killed Petrov, the cop, Vanessa. Next is Fukuyama, as soon as I figure out a way to get close to him. What more can I do?”

“Your failures outweigh your accomplishments,” he says while pouring another. “You know it was never just about the list. If all I wanted was a few people dead, I could have arranged that myself.” The bottle is placed on the counter and slid away before his hands spread across the wood. He leans ever so closer but never breaks the shadow plane.

“You treat wrestling as an afterthought. How will they remember me, if not through you? How will they go to bed frightened every night if you don’t remind them that we’re out there? You are my conduit. You are my legacy. I had two children and I hoped at least one of you would prove worthy. Maybe I was wrong. Nathan was a world champion but now he’s a useless, paralyzed husk who didn’t have the good sense to die when that bus ran him over.”

“And you,” he continues, “you’re ever worse, because you have all the best parts of me and you can’t even stop Sam Tolson or Jack Sullivan from throwing you over a top rope.”

“It’s not my fault,” I say as my confidence shrinks smaller and smaller. “No one has pinned me. No one has made me submit. I didn’t fucking ask to battle through a miniature city. What else am I supposed to do?”

“Win,” he says simply. “At all costs. No matter the circumstances.”

I grab the glass and throw it at him but it sails right, going over his shoulder and crashing into the bottles behind him. Glass shatters. Alcohol spills. I stand up and scream at him.

“You aren’t here! You left me, remember? You fucking died and I’m doing the best I can!”

The music of the band, the cheers of the audience, the clatter of staff serving drinks, and any other thing living or otherwise that makes a sound is suddenly silenced like the wind snatching a flame from a wick.

My head twists around. All of the patrons and band members have abandoned their stations and are now gathered in a large crowd, all unmoving statues with ghastly grins and wide eyes.

The bartender said with a sly little smirk, “Are you done? Good—now SIT DOWN.”

His voice suddenly grows with an inhuman snarl, guttural and primitive, like some wild beast which has long been forgotten by the world of today. It’s monstrous, howling like the ravings of a thousand lunatics being burned at the stake.

I turn forward to see he has retreated into the viscous penumbra. The only visible parts of him are two almond shaped white eyes with black dots in the center. Immediately I’m scared back onto the stool. A new glass is waiting for me, half full with brown liquor and a single ice cube. I reach for it with both hands because they’re shaking so bad.

“Spiral was a great man,” he says, reverting back to dad’s timbre, but my ear discerns another voice speaking in parallel with his; a feminine whisper, raspy and foreboding in tone.

I recognize it immediately. It’s my voice, but it was chewed and twisted, like I swallowed ground glass, chased it with gasoline and swallowed a match. This isn’t my father or some dream-conjured abstraction of him. It’s me. The Other Me, and she’s wearing him like a costume.

As that dreadful realization comes to me, so does another. All the immotile, grinning women gathered not far from my back are wearing my face, too.

“But like all great men, he lived too long,” she says, having shedded all semblance of my father’s pitch and accent. “He became old and weak. Disease grew in his brain like a bad seed and within a short two years reduced him to a pitiful thing.”

Two hands, not my fathers but like mine, reach through the darkness and press on the bar, their fingers spreading unnaturally apart. “He laid in that bed for three months waiting to die, shitting and pissing himself, watching the disgust in the nurse’s face when she had to clean up after him. You remember the smell. It’s hard to forget.”

Her knotty fingers branch out further, like bent tree limbs. “In the end he died like all pretty things—in horror, with what was left of his brain trying desperately to take another breath after his lungs and heart had already given out. You sat there watching him suffocate for minutes, and when it was finally over, you made a promise.”

For a moment, I’m back in my father’s room, sitting at his bedside and counting the beeps on the heart monitor. He’s near death in a drug induced coma, nothing more than a frail skeleton wrapped in loose skin and atrophied muscles but what I remember most are his eyes. They were staring at the ceiling, wet and glassed over. Never blinking and never closing, not even after he passed. It was like he saw something terrifying above him and couldn’t look away.

“What was the promise,” she says, pulling me back to the bar.

My voice shakes. “I promised I would be better than him.”

“And are you?”

“Not yet.”

The Other Me screeches, “You’re going to go to Japan with your new best friend…” I sense a tinge of jealousy. Is she threatened by my relationship with Mari?

“…and you’re going to lose again to Jack Sullivan. You remember what happened when your father was forced to be in tag matches?”

A flash plays in my head of Spiral slamming a chair into the head of one of his tag partners, then another of him walking away while the man is beat down by their opponents.

“Mari is different.”

“And then,” she says, talking over me, “you’re going to go to Vegas a week later and lose in the Terrordome, a match your father invented. My money is on Tolson, by the way. She has a lot more experience climbing ladders than you.”

I lean forward and scowl at the darkness. “If you don’t like it, you’re more than welcome to fuck off. What have you ever done for me that I couldn’t have done myself?”

A laugh bellows out, and her eyes dance around. “When you were all alone with our alcoholic bitch of a mother while daddy dearest was in the nuthouse, I was the one who made you feel like you weren’t alone. I was the one who protected you over the years when you needed to get your hands dirty…”

“…and let’s not forget about them…”

Her hand raises and a disjointed finger directs my eyes to look back at all the disturbing caricatures of myself and the deranged expressions on their faces.

I hesitate to ask. “What about them?”

“They’re us,” she says menacingly. “You don’t remember them because I made you forget. I erased the memory after I took over this Mickey Mouse operation. All these Other Us’s were causing you a lot of distress. Always with the babbling and wailing. It was too much for a kid to bear. Dada of course wasn’t worried, being a little touched himself, but mama? She was very concerned. So concerned that she called a psychiatrist behind dada’s back.”

Suddenly I’m five years old and lying on a coach in a small office. A man in his fifties with bifocals is asking me in Moldovan, “How often do you hear these voices?”

The Other Me draws a long, wheezing breath, like too much air forced through a straw. “The Screaming Mimis, that’s what I call ‘em. They were going to ruin everything, so I had to silence them.”

I look down at my shaking hands and nervously begin rubbing them together. I’m trying to process all of this when a bent finger presses under my chin and lifts my head.

“And, more importantly, I keep them quiet.”

Countless screaming voices flood my head all at once, like lightning in my skull.

(You’re nothing.)

(Cancer in your brain…)

(You’ll always be nothing.)

(Father secretly hated you.)

(…cancer in your brain…)

(You’re fat and disgusting, you pig bitch.)

(DIE ALREADY.)

(…cancer in your brain just like daddy.)

(I think she can hear us.)

(I want to stab your eyes out with a pencil…)

(Don’t listen to them. You’re amazing.)

(…and then use the fluid as ink to write a poem about how much I hate you.)

(You’re smart and beautiful and funny.)

(She can definitely hear us.)

(Good, tell her to cut her fucking throat open.)

(Look at you, you stupid, stupid…)

(Murderer.)

(…stupid fucking whore.)

(CUNT.)

(Kill that bitch Vilaro and throw her body in the ocean for the sharks to eat.)

(I love Mari.)

(You two make a good couple. You should bang.)

(BANG.)

(I hope you get hit by a bus like your brother.)

(BANG.)

(Daddy should have strangled you as a baby and dumped you in the river.)

(One day you will die and the last thing you hear with be MY FUCKING LAUGH. HAAAA HAAAAA HAAAAAA HAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAA.)

I cover my ears but their voices aren’t coming from outside. Every word is echoing in my head like dozens of church bells ringing over top one another, and beneath the discordance was an endless cacophony of laughter.

And then they’re gone and beautiful silence welcomes me into its embrace. My hands slip off my ears and fall into my lap, and I’m sitting there, hunched over, trying to recover from the trauma.

“I went through a lot of trouble locking them up,” the Other Me says from the darkness behind the bar. “It would be a shame to let them out permanently.”

Is that what my brother hears when he’s not on his medication?

“Yes,” she says, answering my thoughts. “More or less.”

How would she know?

“Because I’m smart.” Her hands on the counter whiten from her weight pressing down onto them. “Nate shares our daddy’s gift. His problem is he doesn’t have one like me inside his head. Someone who can keep the others in line. Aren’t you lucky?”

I look up at the two eyes floating in the black void and say, “I don’t think you’re helping me out of the kindness of your heart.”

She says sweetly, “Would you?”

“No,” I answer simply.

Her fingers rap on the bar like a ratchet. “I loved our father, same as you.”

Her fingers drum again, one after the other.

“I want to do what you promised.”

Ra-da-da-dum.

“I want to kill the names on the list.”

Ra-da-da-dum.

“But most importantly, I want to be a world champion, something your father failed to do time, and time again. Something your brother did just a few months into his career. I want what people like Jack Sullivan take for granted—the love and adoration of millions, given voluntarily if they wish, or taken from them as hatred and scorn, pulled like teeth with pliers. In the end, it doesn’t matter, so long as we get what we deserve.”

My eyes lift and I say, “Envy is the ulcer of the soul.”

“Fucking Socrates. Really?”

I stare at her eyes. “That’s all you want? For me to kill my father’s enemies and become a world champion? Aren’t I already working on those two things?”

“You can’t do it alone,” she says with a murmur, “and I’m tired of riding in the backseat all the time.”

And there it was, what she really wants.

“Let’s face it,” she quickly adds, “you need me as much as I need you. Like the song says, We Can Work It Out. So what do you say, hmm? I’m hungry, baby. I wanna eat, too, but I’m done dining at the kiddie table.”

If I say no, she’ll let them out.

She moans, as if she is fine with either outcome.

“Exactamundo, kiddo. No matter what, I get a front row seat to the action. We’ll do terrible things together, or I’ll watch as all those Other Us’s drive you bat shit crazy.”

“Okay,” I say after a long breath. “I accept your deal. We’ll work together.”

Her hands retract into the void then, soon after, a malevolent laugh bellows, long and haughty, so vociferous and harrowing that it spills forth from darkness and echoes like a murder of crows across the club.

Abruptly she thrusts forward from shadow into light, emerging above me from the blanket of darkness with my face, but covered in maggots and mold and smelling of rot.

“We need some ME TIME.”

Her skin shifts and sags off the angles of her face like a poorly fitted rubber mask. One of her gnarled hands reaches up to grab some loose flesh and I witness something truly abhorrent. The face is torn away along with her clothes and the meaty layers of her body like a person suit which lands on the carpet in a wet, sloppy pile.

There now stands a black, glistening creature with RED EYES and rows of SHARP TEETH behind an unhinged Cheshire grin. She’s humanoid in shape with two arms attached to a central torso but she isn’t a woman anymore. She’s something alien. An Entity from beyond.

I try to get away but my foot hooks the stool’s crossbar. I fall to the floor landing hard on my left hip then roll onto my back. The monster leaps over the counter and comes down atop me.

With my arms down pinned down with great strength she spews hot, foul breath in my face. “Look who’s here,” she says with grinning teeth. “Daddy’s girl.”

I turn my head to follow her gaze and I saw all of the Other Me’s shoulder to shoulder in staggered lines, each with a contorted smile slashed across their faces.

“They do like to watch,” she says above me while licking her lips. Her hot body presses against mine and grinds into me like an animal in heat.

I want to struggle. I want to get away. Like Faust, I want to regret taking the deal and giving this thing allowance to use me however she wants, but I don’t, because somewhere, deep down, this is what I’ve always wanted—to never be alone ever again, and there is no one I love more than myself.

My eyes tick over, like the second hand on an analogue clock, and gladly stare into her red eyes without remorse.

I wake up in bed. Angel is asleep next to me. I’m covered in sweat and my heart is racing. My hand pushes slick hair stuck to my face out of the way and I wonder if it was just a dream.

I take several slow, deep breaths. The panic burns out like a fire without fuel and my heartbeat slows. I start to lay back down but I get that feeling like someone’s watching me. Over in the chair, half hidden from the moonlight shining in through the window by the half-closed curtain, is the Other Me.

She says, “We’ve taken our first steps. Together we will achieve great things—terrible things, but great nonetheless.”

I lay down and close my eyes.

And I’m smiling.